I am 41, and have recently been coming to terms with the fact that my relentless drive to pursue big dreams has been one of the chief obstacles to my own happiness, in part because it has encouraged me to devalue comfort and everyday desires. In fact, failing to build in a foundation of comfortable enjoyment has been a significant impediment to accomplishing those big dreams, because the resulting build-boom-crash-regroup cycle has limited my ability to apply energy consistently.

Life is mostly random; you don't get to control as much of it as your analytical brain might like to believe.

Funny, I'm 40 and I'm the opposite: I value comfort and everyday desires too much, and that competes with the drive to pursue big dreams. I feel like if that drive was stronger I'd accomplish so much more, and would be more happy as a result.

Balance in all things, I suppose. It seems to me now that looking for happiness in accomplishment is a bad gamble, because life is not predictable enough. You can't make success happen just by working at it; you have to be in the right place at the right time with the right idea, you have to encounter none of the many outside factors which might derail you, and it's only in hindsight that you get to find out whether you ever had any real hope of success.

Your project will probably fail, because most projects fail, so if you are deferring present happiness in order to invest in the hope of future success, you are probably going to be less happy overall. Success feels good, to be sure - but then what? Another project, which will probably fail. So I think it's important to find a way to live a happy life whether you are trying to accomplish anything or not, and then the occasional success can be a bonus when it happens.

I disagree. I don't see why you always have to do more to be happy. What more do you know about happiness than this guy? If he's satisfied with his life, that sounds pretty close to happiness me

As citizens of earth, we should never stop dreaming and having huge ambitions. We're on the shoulders of people that dreamed of having things better.

We're programmed by modern society to be consumers and not producers. Surely there is more happiness in waking up each day and working toward fulfilling your dreams?

This seems like a young persons fallacy. Why would consumerism be the only reason to drop ambitions? How about acceptance and finding peace? Growing into yourself and seeing your role differently?

I study a lot and perform well at work, but nowadays I would absolutely say it's not from ambition. Instead, it's from me enjoying to play that character in the game of life.

If modern society taught us a fallacy, it is to consider being content as something bad when, in fact, I can think of no better goal to die, and live, happy. Taking the road via accomplishments to get there is not necessarily the most likely way to get there.

> This seems like a young persons fallacy

Yes, and I think there's a lot of value in naiveté especially when pursuing immensely challenging opportunities. I just don't see how you can get out of bed otherwise because most important things are really hard to do.

> I just don't see how you can get out of bed otherwise because most important things are really hard to do.

I am curious as to what it is that you consider so important (and really hard to do)? Most things I see people rushing to do, are not actually important. Perhaps they are important to that person in particular, but such an importance is manufactured and should, if anything, be avoided.

I get out of bed mostly because there are fun and interesting activities available that are more entertaining than lying in bed. I'm not anywhere near anything that's actually important.

Shouldn't something at the very least be important enough to you for you to pursue it? You then project how many people would be impacted by your work and prioritize what to pursue first.

Also, another way to look at it is to empathise with other people's daily challenges and use your skills to come up with a solution that makes their lives easier and at the same time makes you richer because you take a little compensation from a whole lot of people.

Edit:

> I'm not anywhere near anything that's actually important.

If you're getting paid, you're likely doing something important. People do tend to like to hold on to their money.

I think that's what I am trying to say: I don't see anything worth it for me to pursue. Which is why I am curious what it is that you think is so important that you think it's worth pursuing, because I see nothing of the sort.

> If you're getting paid, you're likely doing something important. People do tend to like to hold on to their money.

No, just no. You are committing the error of putting too much faith in the ability of the economic system to capture value. The economic system does not capture value well. All it does is measure scarcity vs desire.

Online casino developers are basically doing harmful work and can be paid quite well.

Social workers, paramedics, etc., and other groups of people doing legitimately important work are paid little, and mothers are paid none.

According to the current economic system of value, oxygen is worthless, as well.

I thought this was honestly obvious and I'm alarmed at your implication that the system's conception of value can be at all used to measure importance. The system surely measures something, but it isn't that.

I'm not sure that there is. Naivete can be useful, and that's the narrative that goes around the tech world a lot, but so does experience with the challenge, the ability to deal with huge changes or crushing failures. I'm not sure if a naive "chasing your dreams" is more or less useful than any other advantage, and I'm not sure that there is data to show one or the other.

As citizens of Earth, our responsibility is to retain the stability of the system or to positively grow the system. Ambitions are often completely in the way of that. Many ambitious projects resulted in colossal damage to the environment or other people. I do not believe that "citizens of Earth" and "huge ambitions" really even belong in the same sentence, as a person with huge ambitions is focused on the short-term progress of the individual, and not the Earth they are a citizen of.

Being happy from fulfilling your dreams only works if your dreams are fulfillable. If they're not, you might very well end up rather unhappy. Happiness in this sense often comes down to a balance between legitimately required things, and managing expectations. Ambition, or large dreams, hardly seem required for happiness, and I'm inclined to say are actually detrimental to it.

Happiness and success should really be kept separate, and both be ends to themselves. A given person deserves their happiness, and useful projects should be completed because they're useful. Deriving happiness from completing a project means you have now made the project all about you, and from here comes corruption, such as continuing a project that has lost its usefulness, taking advantage of other people, or manipulating p-values.

We are also programmed to be producers, but in a way that favors the current economic model. The idea that you absolutely have to make your mark on the world or that people with "normal", boring lives are somehow worth less is quite prevalent and linked to the industrial revolution and modern culture.

I don't mean to discourage you from your own goals, but it's worth considering that as people age, they tend to see glory and distancing themselves from others through social status as less important in comparison to maintaining a social network and a family and even simply enjoying what you already have.

There is plenty of stuff I want to do but I don't feel the pressure to prove anything. To me that's true freedom.

Fair enough. But I imagine you have an incredible amount of talent at this point in your life, there has to be some urgency to use it before you really do become "old."

I would consider 50 to be probably the most productive period of time in someone's life. They finally have enough experience and knowledge to do some pretty amazing things.

Doctors, artist, musicians, programmers? are just getting onto the highway of what's possible in life.

I should hope your brain has this sense of urgency that "you've made it" and now is your time to REALLY do something cool with your life because you've managed to do so much already.

Cheers